This should be no surprise to anyone. Pasport cards and electronic drivers licenses (EDLs) for US citizens, like the RFID-enabled I94 (entry-exit) forms that foreign visitors are required to carry throughout their stay in the US, were deliberately designed to ensure that they could be read at this range, and from inside a car. The idea was for border guards to be able to read the chips for all the passengers in an approaching vehicle, before the vehicle reaches a border checkpoint. In practice, they’ve been plagued by readability and reliability problems, so they haven’t served this purpose at the borders. But they have made it possible for third parties to track people carrying these cards, from a distance.

I was in a meeting a few years ago where Chris Paget demoed his ability to read chips in various cards. It was pretty impressive. Scary too.

And while we're on the subject, California state senator Joe Simitian wanted to know just how easy it is or isn't to hack cards so he hired a security expert to hack into restricted access doors to the state capitol. Here's the report. Have a peek, it's short.

Of course they use the magic "T" word! And keep adding more and more -- fingerprints, iris scans, god knows what next -- on top of the RFID. As Bruce Schneier wrote long, long ago, way before the TSA's Reign of Molestation, every new security procedure brings it with it new ways to get around it, and more and more intrusive procedures to try to counter those ways. In the end, most of them fail. Will find article and post; I have a hard copy, just have to find on-line.
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As was often the case, Bruce Schneierwas thinking about a really terrible idea. We were driving around the suburban-industrial wasteland south of San Francisco, on our way to a corporate presentation, while Schneier looked for something to eat not purveyed by a chain restaurant. This was important to Schneier, who in addition to being America's best-known ex-cryptographer is a food writer for an alternative newspaper in Minneapolis, where he lives. Initially he had been sure that in the crazy ethnic salad of Silicon Valley it would be impossible not to find someplace of culinary interest—a Libyan burger stop, a Hmong bagelry, a Szechuan taco stand. But as the rented car swept toward the vast, amoeboid office complex that was our destination, his faith slowly crumbled. Bowing to reality, he parked in front of a nondescript sandwich shop, disappointment evident on his face . . . .

As demonstrated at Dulles, passengers step up to the TSA desk and scan the bar codes of their boarding passes, like a can of soup at the self-checkout at a grocery store. The TSA officer scans the identification, which the machine authenticates and compares with the boarding pass.

Click to expand...

We could have a lot of fun with this, such as:

1. Take forever to make the scanner work -- mash and crumble your BP several times over
2. As a follow-on to #1, tell the clerk that you never use the self-checkout at Home Depot because you can never get the scanner to work

When you're done, make sure you've really smeared the lens with skin oil.

Like National Opt-out Day, this is an opportunity to gum up the works and do our part to make sure the lines are noticeably longer.

So what happens if you're standing in front of one of their new-fangled ID scanners & it picks up some extra transmissions? Sew a couple RFID chips into your clothing, drop one or two into your purse & each pocket of your carryon. At some point it should be possible to overload the machine or operator with too much data, depending on how powerful & how directional its signal is.

If you're from a state that has the new "enhanced drivers licenses" (just NY & WA, I think) and have both styles of IDs, exchange IDs with RFID chips with your travel partner & keep them in your backpacks or purses, offer the ID checker the non-RFID documents & see if the new-fangled ID machine picks up on the other one that you're carrying.

I don't see how they can make it illegal to carry bogus RFID chips -- they are already in merchandise both for inventory tracking & anti-theft purposes and even pets are now routinely chipped.

I believe I just mangled a post by Sunny Goth, probably by clicking "Edit" instead of "Reply". The result was a post that appeared to be by Sunny that wasn't hers at all, and there wasn't enough left of the original to restore anything. Sorry, coaches screw up sometimes.

The point I was answering was that yes, the screeners would have to notice and say something about the extra RFID chip, but they might get REALLY excited about it if they think you might be their big catch of the day.

I believe I just mangled a post by Sunny Goth, probably by clicking "Edit" instead of "Reply". The result was a post that appeared to be by Sunny that wasn't hers at all, and there wasn't enough left of the original to restore anything. Sorry, coaches screw up sometimes.

The point I was answering was that yes, the screeners would have to notice and say something about the extra RFID chip, but they might get REALLY excited about it if they think you might be their big catch of the day.

Some media outlets are misstating this as not having to deal with a smurf checking IDs, e.g. WEAR TV and The Consumerist.

As I understand it, the passenger will scan his boarding pass, the smurf will scan the ID, and presumably the smurf will ascertain that you bear some resemblance to the photo on the ID. If the smurf still makes squiggles on your boarding passes, there's no net gain, except that perhaps the machine will recognize the Passport Cards that seem to be beyond the cognition of so many smurves.

I'm merely a simpleton for seeing this as another step of brokeness to fix something already broken, but the people behind it are so stubbornly in denial they create and pile on more and more broken to overly break this brokeness.

what? That was a whole lot of crap that barely makes any sense? Exactly. Let's add another layer of the same and hope for something different.